I wrote a script several months ago to go through an Amazon wish list and find the combination of items that will best fit within a given budget. Given that the Christmas holiday shopping season seems to have started before Thanksgiving, it seemed topical to release it.

It used the Amazon Web Services API, which is a complete crock (among other failings, it will consistently not return the Amazon.com price for an item, even when explicitly instructed to do so). It does not look like Amazon pays any particular attention to the bug reports I filed. I just gave up on the API and re-implemented it the old-fashioned way, by “scraping” Amazon’s regular (and most definitely not XML-compliant) HTML pages.

It is still very much work in progress, but already somewhat useful. You can use it directly by stuffing your wish list ID in the URL (or using the form below):

Wish list ID

Amount

A better way is to drag and drop the highlighted Amazon optimizer bookmarklet link (version 6 as of 2007-05-08) to your browser’s toolbar. You can then browse through Amazon, and once you have found the wish list you are looking for, click on the bookmarklet to open the optimizer in a new window (or tab). By default, it will try and fit a budget of $100 (my decadent tastes are showing, are they not?), but you can change that amount and experiment with different budgets. Surprisingly often, it will find an exact fit. Otherwise, it will try to find the closest match under the budget with as little left over as possible.

There are many caveats. The wishlist optimizer only works for public Amazon.com (US) wish lists. There does not seem to be an easy way to buy multiple items for somebody else’s wish list in one step, although I am working on it, so you will have to go through the wish list and add the items by hand. Shipping costs and wish list priorities are currently not taken into account. Sometimes Amazon will not show a price straight away but instead require you to click on a link, the optimizer will decline to play these marketer’s games and just skip those products.

Be patient – Amazon.com is rather slow right now — it seems they did not learn the lessons of their poor performance towards the end of last year. One of my coworkers ran the optimizer through an acid test with his wife’s 13-page wish list, and it took well over a minute and half to fetch the list, let alone optimize it. One can only imagine how bad it will get when the Christmas shopping season begins in earnest. To mitigate this somewhat, I have added caching – the script will only hit Amazon once per hour for any given wish list. As it works by scraping the web site rather than using the buggy and unreliable Amazon Web Services API, there is a real risk it will stop working if Amazon blocks my server’s IP or if they radically change their wish list UI (they would do better to add additional machines and load-balancers, but that would be too logical).

Update (2005-12-02):

Predictably, Amazon changed their form (they changed the form name from edit-items to editItems) and broke not only the wishlist optimizer, but also the bookmarklet. I fixed this and upgraded to the scraping module BeautifulSoup, but you will need to use the revised bookmarklet above to make it work again.

Update (2010-04-27):

The script has been broken for quite a while, but I fixed it and it should work again.